


Zaara's Granddaughter

by pitraye



Category: Veer Zaara
Genre: Eid ka Chand, Ethnicity, Gen, Identity, Islam, Muslim Character, Race, class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-11
Updated: 2010-09-11
Packaged: 2017-10-11 16:29:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/114377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pitraye/pseuds/pitraye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This story is written from the perspective of Zaara Haayat Khan's granddaughter (non-canon). She is biracial, and estranged from her South Asian/Indian and Muslim heritage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Zaara's Granddaughter

When I was younger, my baba's family visited our house in Hyderabad a fair few times, but I almost never went to see them in Punjab. Baba went more often—and he often wanted me to come along—but I always made up some excuse or other, or school was in the way. Anyway, the tension between Ma and Baba was always worse, or more embarrassing at any rate, around the rest of the family.

But the main reason was always that I was hurrying on my way to Amerika. I was tired of the language barrier between my family and me, of not knowing Hindi/Urdu properly, but if I were going to just go off there, then it wouldn't matter anymore, right? I was tired of all the things I couldn't and didn't know. When I wasn't busy feeling superior, I wanted to be one of them… I wanted to listen to Zaara Dadima's stories, and I wanted to remember.

Zaara Dadima was always my favourite. She used to give me jalebi a lot, and sometimes kaju burfi, and she told me all about the many years she spent waiting for Veer Dadaji. She told me many times in many different ways, really, and sometimes she didn't tell me as much as other times. I used to tell her about my friends a lot, especially Garima, who was always coming up with some new crazy idea. Like the time we picked flowers from everyone's gardens and made mud flower cakes. Oh wait, that one was actually my idea… Never mind! Zaara Dadima teased me about things like that a lot. She used to ask me how I was doing in school too, but not as much as everyone else did, not the way Baba did. Nowadays I wish I had recorded all our conversations, every last one, just how it was. But they decreased more and more as I grew older, and closer to Amerika.

Baba tells me these days that all I have to do, really, is call them. Call Zaara Dadima. I have always wanted to ask Baba what it's like being adopted, but maybe it isn't like anything at all. Zaara Dadima has told me some things. I know that he was one of the children she and Shabbo Dadi adopted into their village school. He was different from a lot of the other children because he was an orphan, and he was Muslim. His parents had recently been killed in the 1993 riots and a Sikh uncle, a family friend, had taken Baba with him back to his village in Punjab. It's funny thinking that all these things actually happened to my Baba. He doesn't talk about it. But I know that Zaara Dadima saved his life.

***

I am not close to many people from India or anywhere else in South Asia here at college. I walk with my hair unfurled and angry, and I'd like to chop it all off, or wear headscarfs, but I never wanted to before and it seems pretentious now. Yesterday I was on the bus to town, and Safaa and Naureen were sitting behind me—these girls I'd like to be friends with, but don't know how. Back in our first year, Safaa and I had a long talk about being Muslim and modesty and dress and decorum. I wanted so badly to believe I could be like her. But I am not like her. Even if I did dress in Indian clothing (which I have), I… do not look the part… Baba is proud, but more reluctantly, perhaps… I am a strange Muslim girl, not the kind you're supposed to be. Not like the other women—

I want to be like Zaara Dadima. I want to be as beautiful as she is. When she was my age she lived in Pakistan and she had so many servants and beautiful things. Baba tells me I'm a spoiled brat, but there's something about being a spoiled brat in the context of insecure economic status that just isn't the same. I always wanted to be a spoiled brat, you see, the kind that was real. Not like the Amerikan spoiled brats, with their purposely frayed and patched "hippie" jeans and scruffy Converses, their multicolored hair and multiple piercings. I have enough dignity to be disdainful of that, at least. (There was a time when I wanted to be that, but I am not that shameless now).

I wonder if Baba wanted me to care as much about Islam as he does, as Zaara Dadima does. He never really said. Ma is cultureless; white. I guess she has sovereignty in the neutrality of her "culture." I care more here, when my Amerikan white lovers stare at me, a little afraid, when I tell them I'm a Muslim… I care more when one of my white lovers is Muslim, and I hate that he can be.

The plainness of Amerika stretches out before me. Endless office complexes; and grey, brown, and beige streets (bleeding into the red and blue). Things were exciting when I was little—pretty porcelain dolls who looked nothing like me, and the promise of a secularism that maybe didn't hurt (but it did). The plainness, and I have forgotten Zaara Dadima.


End file.
